People don't go to a search engine to look at ads, despite of what Google may say. Most everyone knows that half of these ads are scams, and the other half is of dubious precedence. People visit a search engine because they want to see organic results. For example, most people, as soon as they have enough technical ability, choose to install ad blockers to avoid losing their time with Google ads.

I do not install ad-blockers. Tried out Ad-Block Plus, but disabled it after a week. Your claim about "most people" installing ad-blockers as soon as they can is completely unsubstantiated.

I don't do that because if a website or web service doesn't respect me as a customer, pushing annoying ads down my throat, I would rather stop reading/using it, which is a form of voting with your wallet. Instead I prefer to reward loyalty to websites that are tasteful and put users interests first. As an example, such a website would be Reddit.

Installing ad-blockers has the reverse effect of what most users want. Ads will become more and more intrusive and difficult to block. And by visiting such a website, you're still giving that website eyeballs, you're still passing links around to your friends, you're still rewarding them for their behavior. It's like hiding the cookie jar from a fat kid, then congratulating him for being fat.

Installing ad-blockers is also immoral, just as software piracy is. I've seen arguments of people that don't think so, but it's hard to justify the piracy of Photoshop when there are free or cheaper alternatives available, it's hard to justify the piracy of MS Office when LibreOffice is available and it's hard to justify using Google Search with ad-blockers when there are alternatives like DDG.

If you don't like the ads served, just don't freaking use the service/website in question. It's amazing how self-entitled some people are.

> If you don't like the ads served, just don't freaking use the service/website in question.

I have zero responsibility in the website business model. I don't want to see ads either on TV or on the web, I use the available tools. I've used ad blockers proxies since 1998 or so.

When some websites (reddit, osnews) ask nicely to deactivate adblock to support them, I do. When they whine about how that's their business model (like ars technica), I don't.

Oh BTW software piracy isn't immoral. It's maybe wrong, but morality has nothing to do with it. After all Photoshop and MS Office success rely at least for a part on software piracy. Furthermore, from your point of view Gutenberg was wrong because of all those poor scribes he put out of jobs by going against their century-proven business model. Does not make much sense, doesn't it?

I also hate ads on TV. That's why I don't watch TV anymore. Except for HBO which is not ad-supported.

This is not about responsibility towards a business model, it's more about rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. As a consumer, you definitely don't want bad treatment.

    After all Photoshop and MS Office success rely at
    least for a part on software piracy

That's true, but look at the other side of the coin as well ... because of software piracy, alternatives don't have a chance to penetrate a market that's monopolized. It also keeps Microsoft and Adobe lazy. No competition means no incentive to improve and no incentive to lower the prices.

Companies like Adobe and Microsoft have pockets deep enough to ensure that piracy is kept under control. But the story is very different for small companies or independent developers that just want to make a living. Also piracy doesn't work in the same way for games, or other products that people aren't using on a daily basis.

That's why I consider piracy immoral - it kills small software developers, it perpetuates the monopoly of big companies and is simply unfair to the people that worked on that software, pushing them towards more control, flawed technologies (DRM) and server-side subscriptions (in which case users don't really own anything anymore, not even their own data).

Notice that I don't like software piracy either, and I don't pirate myself: I use almosts exclusively free software (yes, I'm one of these guys :) and I buy my music, movies and the very few proprietary programs I use (like some games).

However, it seems to me that software piracy is a given of the media; there is no solution to it. Remember the 1976 Bill Gates' open letter to pirates? It's like drug prohibition: there is one supposed "right" state of the affairs which is unattainable, but for some reason the pragmatic approach is taboo.

I suppose software piracy is actually closer to the "tragedy of the commons" mechanisms than actual theft.

Yeah, I agree, piracy is not theft, but new business models are needed.

For the record, I also pirate movies and music from time to time, because I live in Romania and getting certain music and movies is difficult - most content available in the US is either not available in my country, or is made available with a significant delay. I don't have access to services like Netflix, the content on iTunes is a fraction of what's available in the US, the local bands still sell packaged CDs and we don't have a local Amazon/iTunes, etc...

Fortunately for HBO Romania, they are airing shows as soon as they are available. I also go out to movie theaters, but I only go to movies that are worth it. I'm not going to go out for a subpar movie, but I would pay $2 for viewing it in my home, if only such a thing was possible as soon as they are released.

Basically these media companies are shooting themselves in the foot by restricting the availability of content. Too bad that we don't have a "piracy subscription" to be paid monthly, because I would gladly pay it.

You're absolutely right, people don't go to search engines to look at ads: they go to search engines to find the most relevant answers to their queries. In many commercial query cases, the most relevant/useful links could be paid search links that an interested advertiser thinks is super-relevant to your query, enough so to actually put down money to pay for you to click over and see their site.

"Most everyone knows that half.." - I think that statements needs to be qualified because as far as I have observed, only tech people approach targeted Google ads with this much skepticism that 50% of ads are scams and 50% are dubious.

I have never clicked a google ad, except accidentally, and I've been using Google since close to the beginning.

I find that difficult to believe unless you are determined to disregard them. Especially when searching for a product to purchase, the best companies will advertise and often show a deal not obviously available in the search results.

Are you sure about that? If I search for "plumber philadelphia", I'm looking at organic and paid sections of the results page. The results in the paid sections tend to be pretty solid. They are local plumbers taking the time out and spending their ad budget online. To me that's a plus, along with a solid website.

Your description matches my perception of facebook ads, but not google ads. When I go to a search engine looking to spend money, I actually do expect ads and evaluate them first. Despite having the technical know-how to install an ad blocker, I haven't done so.

(Your statements imply majority or near-consensus opinions; I see no evidence to support these assertions.)

Correct. a search might show an ad which is highly relevant, but in most cases, the same link also appears in the search result, and I always click the one in the search result. Sometimes I am wondering if I should click the ad instead to let Google earn some money, but I am afraid the link contains strange parameters that would send information which I'm not willing to share.

>>If you're shopping for something, the paid and Google shopping results are often more relevant than the organic results since a lot of them incorporate real time price feeds or promotion codes.<<

In many cases such feed prices are inaccurate. I have used Google shopping many times looking for the advertised price only to find it's "out of stock" or the promotion had ended by the time you click the link. People do the same crap to the other shopping search engines too.

>Advertisers do not bid on keywords that deliver no economic value so it's in their best interest to only show up when they are the most relevant to your query.<

In some case the economic value isn't in the best interest of users. A lot of spam targets installing malware, invading privacy, or similar. Further, there are ads which advise you to "buy x thousand links for cheap" or similar, which at their core suggest you violate Google's search guidelines. And Google had like 50,000 advertisers pushing counterfeit goods at one point (according to Google) and that issue got cleaned up only after Google was hit with a sting operation where they were caught selling ads for steroids for a person posing as a Mexican drug lord. Apparently the drug lord had a high quality score at the time. ;)

> when in study after study, at least on Adwords and SEM, paid results often boost relevance vs. a page only of organic results.

Can you point to some of those studies ?

At Blekko.com we've looked into this, more of an a/b test driven model rather than a definitive survey, but one challenge is this, you send two pages to an unbiased observer (which is code for someone who didn't do the search, they are just looking at the search query and the results page and deciding which is 'better') the results will favor ads, but the meta issue is that the ads are curated, not algorithmic.

Specifically some person said "If someone searches for 'x,y, z' put my Ad up there" which is still much more accurate than an algorithm trying to guess. We do a game on our search page where if you put /monte at the end of your query we'll throw up the Google results, the Bing results, and the Blekko results. Then you get to pick the one that you, the searcher, thought was the best answer. We've found that well curated categories do really well in this comparison. Ads are simply a market motivated curation of Google's results.

The studies were not public and were part of research projects and relevance insights I had access to in prior positions.

This is a failure on Google's part, perhaps their most dangerous weakness.

Why is having a business model that generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, employs tens of thousands of people, and still allows you to maintain dominance considered a failure?

The ads platform is self-optimizing, punishing advertisers with poor ads, low relevance, and poor brand perception. This results in ads that are from more trustworthy sellers and whom generate real customer interaction to justify buying those ads. To me, this system encourages higher relevance in commerce queries because those who deliver the best user experiences after you leave Google are the ones that can afford to bid to the top of the ads marketplace.

As you said, people dismiss them. That's a failure.

It's a failure to deliver value to the searcher and a failure to deliver value to the advertiser.

The idea is fine, but if in practice people just ignore the ads...

Google is making great money from search-based ads, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads.

The obvious opportunity for a competitor is to correct that inefficiency and deliver more value for searchers and advertisers.

Great question, I think should have qualified my earlier comment that "people" was in reference to those of us involved in tech/startups. I haven't seen the recent studies but a lot of people click on paid ads, even more surprising is that a lot of people don't even know the difference or care about the difference.

I don't know if I would call it a failure for the advertiser since compared to other forms of advertising, you only pay when users engage with your ad. Impressions are free for the advertisers if users see but don't click. For Google, I do agree that it's a qualified failure in that some people want to block these results or ignore them but I think they've been taking steps to fix this by making ads less static and more dynamic like with their shopping results or with their hotel/airfare products.

FWIW, if I'm doing an obviously commercial query - usually comparison shopping or looking for local businesses or professional services - I click on the ads all the time. It's like having hand-curated search results where each curator has an incentive to put their best foot forwards.

It's hand-curated where the curator has a strong bias. That's not really curation.

I'm very rarely looking for a search result that takes me to a place to spend money.

Even with commercial queries, I'm usually looking for a review of some sort first, and only then am I looking for the opportunity to buy.

The curator always has a bias, usually a strong bias. At least when it's labeled as an Ad, you know the bias exists and can account for it by visiting multiple sites. The only way to solve bias issues is to get many contrasting viewpoints so you can decide for yourself what the reality is.

I usually have both the query and query + [reviews] open in separate tabs. Either that, or just the reviews query, because that usually surfaces enough ads that I can click through all the major players myself.

I'm rarely looking for a search result that takes me to a place to spend money either, but when I'm not I usually don't get ads either. Check out [jquery touch] or [haskell ffi] or even [gabby douglas] and [us open]. No ads on any of them.

People dismiss TV ads. Are they failures? No, the point of ads is not that 100% pay attention to them. The point is that there is that 0.01% of people who are going to look at it, and at a large enough scale it become worth it. That is why TV advertising and online advertising has not died.

It also doesn't mean that there is a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads.

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, or what constitutes a large number. I'm not saying your wrong exactly, but it sounds like some pretty significant assumptions are being made in your statement. Proof?

I was actually under the impression that most people find the ads relevant more often that not. However, I can't remember where I read that so I won't stand behind it.

Pardon, but how do you propose that a competitor convince people who ignore ads to stop ignoring them?

That's the $100 billion dollar question.

Someone will do it better than Google is doing it now. It might be Google that improves it, it might not.